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HOPE BENHAM, by Nora Perry: in which a concerned mother deliberately excludes one of her daughter's female friends from a birthday party for Immoral Behaviour...that was committed with said mother's own son.
(Said Immoral Behaviour consisting of a trip to a theatre matinée, not a brothel followed by an opium den.)
...a girl is supposed to be a little differently situated from a boy. If she has been brought up like a lady, she isn't expected to be planning meetings with young men on the sly. She is supposed to have a little dignity; and as everybody knows that no boy would think of proposing such silly out-of-the-way things to a girl unless he had been encouraged by her to dare them, so the girl who is found to have gone on in such silly ways is talked about as bold and unladylike, and that is an injury that may leave a black and blue spot on her forever; and you must see, if you will stop to think about it a minute, that such a girl would injure the school she happened to be in,—would leave a black and blue spot on that.
...And when I said I thought that Raymond was as much to blame, in asking her to go to the matinée, as Dorothea was in going, mamma said that that didn't help her case at all; that Raymond's invitation was only the result of her own loud, free ways; that he would never have thought of inviting her like that, if she had been a different kind of girl.
Thomas Hardy found a few things to say about this sort of thing three years prior to publication...but then again, this one was a Yankee novel. Americans!
(And the strange thing is that this illustration of RUINED FOREVER is still used by certain American abstinence message-preaching.)
There's also an hilarious moral message on how you ought to be kind and considerate to your perceived social inferiors, because they might in fact turn out to be of the same class as you and their fathers could become millionaires later on.
(I think I may try to do short reviews of novels I've read on Project Gutenberg, for the world ought to know more of Angela Brazil and LT Meade and Mary Elizabeth Braddon.)
(Said Immoral Behaviour consisting of a trip to a theatre matinée, not a brothel followed by an opium den.)
...a girl is supposed to be a little differently situated from a boy. If she has been brought up like a lady, she isn't expected to be planning meetings with young men on the sly. She is supposed to have a little dignity; and as everybody knows that no boy would think of proposing such silly out-of-the-way things to a girl unless he had been encouraged by her to dare them, so the girl who is found to have gone on in such silly ways is talked about as bold and unladylike, and that is an injury that may leave a black and blue spot on her forever; and you must see, if you will stop to think about it a minute, that such a girl would injure the school she happened to be in,—would leave a black and blue spot on that.
...And when I said I thought that Raymond was as much to blame, in asking her to go to the matinée, as Dorothea was in going, mamma said that that didn't help her case at all; that Raymond's invitation was only the result of her own loud, free ways; that he would never have thought of inviting her like that, if she had been a different kind of girl.
Thomas Hardy found a few things to say about this sort of thing three years prior to publication...but then again, this one was a Yankee novel. Americans!
(And the strange thing is that this illustration of RUINED FOREVER is still used by certain American abstinence message-preaching.)
There's also an hilarious moral message on how you ought to be kind and considerate to your perceived social inferiors, because they might in fact turn out to be of the same class as you and their fathers could become millionaires later on.
(I think I may try to do short reviews of novels I've read on Project Gutenberg, for the world ought to know more of Angela Brazil and LT Meade and Mary Elizabeth Braddon.)
